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The woeful state of public sector procurement

2/11/2014

3 Comments

 
Posted by Jon
I think my mission in life for the year ahead ought to be to destroy public sector procurement as it now functions in the UK.
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The job of buying on behalf of government? I have no idea if there’s a grand, centrally-held mission statement somewhere in Whitehall, or in town halls across the nation. But were I to have a go at drafting it at my desk early on Saturday morning before my first coffee of the day, it’d read something like:
Professionally sourcing solutions from the market that enable the most effective and most efficient delivery of public services to those who depend on them.
It should be about drawing out excellent offers via excellent proposals from competent bidders, in a well-managed, fair and cost-effective way. As founder of a business, I’d like to hope it helps smaller and local businesses (and disadvantaged groups) to thrive.
As a taxpayer – both personally and through our company – I’d also hope it would be about ensuring value for money: not necessarily the cheapest (for cheap is rarely cheerful), but the option that delivers the best overall use of scarce public funds. That has to be a holistic view – not just the costs billed by the eventual supplier, but factoring in the time and cost of those on the government side of the procurement and delivery too.
To give just a few illustrations of how the inept cadre of so-called procurement ‘professionals’ operate right now in the UK public sector from deals we’ve worked on in 2014 to date:

  • Numerous local councils across the country needing to replace a supplier that’s quitting the market, each conducting entirely separate procurement exercises in parallel; each developing their own (typically very second-rate) ITT with different specs and questions about what is fundamentally a very simple commodity purchase.
  • A major government department issuing 300 pages of questions for a contract worth under £1m – and for which there are already robust and toughly-negotiated framework agreements in place that they could have used.
  • Documents issued to bidders in late December, with a response date in early January, with the added fun that clarification questions couldn’t be answered until a couple of days before proposals were due in “because everyone’s on holiday”.
  • A project that has huge implications on a local community, being awarded purely on the basis of the short written proposal that bidders are required to submit, with no meetings whatsoever between the agency concerned and potential suppliers to discuss their proposed approaches.
  • Laughable word-count limits on answers in eTendering systems. Because, you know, it’s obviously possible for a supplier to explain in full how a highly sensitive service protecting the most vulnerable people in our society can be delivered from a technical perspective within the 250 word box you’ve provided – especially when the question you’ve posed is itself three pages long and itself contains numerous contradictions and errors.
  • Bids on which several suppliers score “100% for quality”. Utter nonsense: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a truly perfect proposal, not least when the buying teams aren’t that clear or realistic about what’s needed for success and their RFPs are so badly-written. But, hey, if we’re not bright enough to differentiate between potential solutions, let’s lazily score them all high and just argue about price.
  • An eProcurement system that offers two settings: the standard view, and an alternative view for the visually-impaired. Praiseworthy, save for the fact that the way of making the ITT easier to respond to for the visually-impaired is simply to leave the question numbers on the screen but delete all of the questions.

Duplicating and wasting effort. Running ridiculously complex processes that merely seem to protect or generate jobs for civil servants. Treating the supply market with contempt. And, as a result, no doubt resulting in poorer public services for those who depend on them, and wasting taxpayers’ money. Who’s in control of this stuff? And is it any wonder that if things are done so very badly on smaller and medium-sized projects, we hear tell of so many disasters on major procurement exercises?

Actually, I’m not sure I blame the individuals: when ineptitude is so widespread, it has to be the system to blame – the very role of the purchasing function; the processes it follows; the calibre of staff recruited (partly tied into the salaries and grades for the job); the training offered; the way feedback from the market is handled.
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Of course, it’s easy to pick on isolated examples of poor practice – and this post is designed to be provocative: something of a Modest Proposal. There are, of course, many incredibly diligent, top-class procurement folks working in the public sector. But life for them must be very lonely.

Any thoughts? Or am I standing on this soapbox alone?


3 Comments
Lauren
3/25/2016 02:31:05 pm

Jon, spot on.. and many of your points translate across the pond to the US, and even to non-government procurements. If you are reaching out on behalf of either the government or the company you work for, don’t you want to take the time to ensure the successful outcome of the project overall? It requires the same level of commitment from both sides of the table. Unfortunately, from what I have heard on the procurement side, procurement folks are running 6-10 RFPs at the same time, all of which are different topics with different internal customers. How are they supposed to handle that? I hope one day to be able to partner more with the procurement side, so we can all get better outcomes!

Reply
Ruth Lown Turman
3/25/2016 02:31:18 pm

No, Jon, you’re not on that soap box alone. However, you are preaching primarily to the choir.

We have to wonder about a 100+ page Statement of Work crammed with highly technical requirements, each of which the offeror is instructed to “fully explain how the offeror will design, test, and implement.” In addition to another 5-6 pages of uncorrelated “major topic” evaluation criteria (such as program management, staffing plans, etc.). In 70 pages. Granted, I was never very good at math, but I’m not sure but what they’re asking for here entails breaking laws of physics.

Not necessarily questioning the need for a procurement team to have this information (although that is an entirely different debate) to make a decision. Even if its sole purpose is to justify procurement positions or to make them feel “warm and fuzzy.” Just once, it would be a relief to see an RFP that doesn’t required a Ph.D. in logic and artificial intelligence just to figure out how to respond to all of the requirements in some logical sequence that is BOTH easy to formulate and evaluate.

Lauren is also “spot on.” What is needed is PARTNERSHIP between procurement AND proposal/tender professionals. Simply starting with a dialog would be a major step in the right direction.

So Jon, what can we do to help?

Reply
JRC
3/25/2016 02:31:37 pm

“Laughable word-count limits on answers in eTendering systems”

Off-topic here, but if I could get my clients to accept word counts, laughable or not, I’d be a happy man. As a tender designer for over a decade my customers nearly always stipulate that they want their tender answers to be set in “no more than three pages of !0pt Arial” – which means my authors usually try and cram as many words as they possibly can into those three pages. If they would just stipulate a word count I could give them a much more legible document, with an easy-to-read font set at a slightly smaller size which would probably take up less space. We’ve asked them several times in the past to go for a word count but they just won’t budge from their font size.

There, that’s MY soapbox!

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